Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  “What state were you born in?”

  “I just not so sure ’bout that,” she said. “I don’t remember nobody ever say, when I was little, only how Shady Grove be not too far away. Luverne, they sometimes say, and Petrey and Ramar? Highland Home not too far, and Helicon.”

  I shook my head. I put my arm on the table and laid my cheeks on it. My womb throbbed.

  “Now don’t be getting the miseries,” she said. “Here, you drink some more of this good liquor.”

  I obeyed, but my face was a flame and I kept my head on the table. This was Susan, who had saved my life. Like a child, I took my thumbnail and cut the rim of the candle so that the melt flowed through and down the side of the taper and clung there, hardening into a line of drops. When Uncle took us to Boston, I saw among religious artifacts from around the world a picture of Jesus in a shop window, and down his face was a line of blood drops oozing from the crown of thorns. There was a gush from my body, and I knew I was passing blood again, but it did not keep up.

  “Then he died.”

  “Jesus?”

  “The old raisin man. I asked him did he reckon the Lord would come back with his lantern for me, but Old Sam just stretch out his thin little arm and show me the stars and the Drinking Gourd. The last thing he say was ‘The stars they jes’ the same as Jesus.’ ”

  With a jolt, I caught myself sliding off the chair toward sleep. “Couldn’t you say,” I asked as kindly as I could, “that Sam was your guide?”

  Susan slapped both her palms down on the table and jumped up. “Then who lifted me? Who lifted me high in the tree and made the tree grow up so tall like fifty years passed so dogs couldn’t catch no scent ’cause I was caught up in the clouds with the Lord?”

  “Dogs!”

  “Oh, yes. Dogs with teeth long as your fingers, sharp as your needle.”

  I sat up straight and watched Susan pace around the room. I resolved to force no more skeptical interpretations on her story.

  “Love lifted me,” Susan went on. She stopped pacing, stood still, and slowly raised her hands so that I might understand the idea of being lifted. “The true name of the Lord is Love.” And she smiled wide. Then she brought her lips together and said, “There is faith that move mountains. That make a scrawny tree grow tall. That lift you high above the dog bite. That’s what I mus’ tell you ’fore I leave. I could reach in this hearth fire, reach on in there, draw out burning coal, and not be burnt no more than Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.”

  “Then do it,” I said. I felt all my love for Susan fall away from me the way a ginkgo tree can suddenly drop its leaves in the night. I stood up, too, ugly and skeletal, as though pain and anger had burnt me and I stood a column of blackened bone. “Oh, Ahab,” I called. “Lightning has struck me as well as thee!”

  Susan ran to the fireplace, knelt, and drew out an ember. She tossed it from one hand to the other, and then she plucked out another glowing coal and another. She commenced to toss and catch them in a small circle over her lap like the stars in Betsy Ross’s flag till she slowly rose up, enlarging the circle as she stood. Then her whole form stood in a hoop of flame, and she began to dance. She caught the coals against the insides of her ankles and on the tops of her feet, and tossed them up again, but there was no sign of pain or burning. She appeared to have many arms and she danced in a circle of fire.

  “Shiva!” I gasped and fainted.

  HAD I DREAMT? I know I dreamt of humpbacked whales that night, and how they formed a circle and blew a net of bubbles, how they lunged up through the center of that net, jaws agape, funneling the tiny sea creatures into their massive bodies, fueling whatever fires must be kept burning to warm them when they returned to the depths.

  And I dreamt a Greekmyth, of Cronos eating his baby.

  And then it was time to wake, time for our last day together, and for the final preparations for her journey.

  And my love for Susan? Returned and freshened. Our differences mattered not at all. Just as new leaves return to the branches of the winter-black tree, so was I, all aflutter with green love. Susan had lived her own story. If I lacked tolerance—she had not tried coercion as my father had—then I was the smaller person for it.

  After the funeral, I could reenter the cabin because Susan was there, hidden in the sea chest, ready to rise up and embrace me.

  “FREEDOM!”—Susan’s cry came thin and sharp from across the moving river ice. At that distance, she was but a shape, a wedge, ferreting through brambles on the free side of the Ohio. Yet still she was Susan, and I knew the bite of her studded shoes into the snow, for I had tried them on, and I knew the weight of the many-threaded coat on her shoulders. I knew the soft nudge of the velvet Precious-bag against the skin of her chest, and inside the bag at the beginning of the seam the messy wattle of her sewing knot.

  And, though Susan did not know it, my mother’s silver thimble with a pad of yarn in its tip was hidden inside her coat pocket. During the late afternoon the last day, secretly, while she carried out our slops, I had sewn the thimble into a tiny pocket within the pocket and sewn that secret compartment shut. Some day she would feel it as a pebble, perhaps, that had worked its way into the lining of her coat. Whenever that day came, she would grow curious, explore, pull the familiar pocket wrong side out, note the seam of overcast stitches. Bemused, she would mutter, “What is this?” and take a blade to the line of whipstitch. Then she would spread the fingers of her right hand and slip the thimble onto her finger.

  As I stood on the snowy bank and watched her go, I wheeled the ivory bracelet around my wrist. S at the bottom of the thimble cup was even the right initial. When Susan was out of sight, I turned back toward the cabin. The moon hung like a lantern above us both. Beside me, the river sped its freight of ice floes downstream.

  CHAPTER 93: Shakespeare and Company

  BEFORE I WENT into the cabin, I circled to my mother’s root cellar, knowing it brimmed with the bounty of our autumn harvest. The snow reflected the moonlight so well that I scarcely felt it was night. But when I reached the place, the wooden door was broken. Perhaps a bear had found a palatial den there. But no, this was the work of men. The bounty hunters? Earlier thieves? They had not left enough food to see me through till spring. The shelves had been ravaged by deft hands with opposable thumbs. A few things were broken—a jar of cucumber pickles, an overturned barrel of dried corn. And there were the fresh droppings of raccoons who were taking advantage of the spill. Yes, I had seen their star-shaped tracks in the snow outside.

  Some items had been left. A sack of pumpkin seeds, two jugs of cider, a burlap bag of dried shelly beans. The moonlight reflected eerily into the cave through the broken door. I found a jam cake deep in a keg of sugar. The spuds were all gone into thieving pockets. I determined to transport as much of the leavings as I could to the cabin.

  As I lugged my basket up the slope to the house, I began taking mental inventory of what should be quickly eaten and what would serve me well while I waited for spring and the first hoot of a steamboat on the river. I knew the cabin itself was full of food that the neighbors had sent home with me after the funeral. My treasure was a large smoked gift ham. Bits of that, simmered with the shelly beans, would see me through. The cow and chickens my mother had sent to board at a neighbor’s, but I could claim some milk and eggs.

  Though it was bad luck to find the root cellar looted, it immediately challenged me to try to be clever, to calculate how to survive without begging. And of course the neighbors, knowing that I had no way to visit them, save walking, would come from time to time. Likely they had worked out a schedule among themselves. And each would come with some gift of food that would add surprise and variety to my table. What to do with my loneliness? Even before I gained the cabin, I decided: I would read.

  THAT NIGHT, I did read a bit. I read Byron for his naughty wit. But the rimes rang dull as lead coins. I tried Words worth—but those lines had been too loved, by Giles and me, by my mother and me. “I
n vacant or in pensive mood…” But my heart did not dance with the daffodils. I turned the book over and stared into the flames. I thought of Susan dancing in a wheel of fire. Was I in the realm of memory or imagination? I heated cider and added to it a large teaspoon of the whiskey. Certainly I would not drink it by the cup again! I loaded the popper with kernels and held it close to the fire. The first tiny explosions seemed as hollow as they had once seemed joyful and convivial. O, the loneliness of that little thudding. But I ate the popcorn anyway. The fire had been too high, and much of it was burnt black. Such a long day, but I did not want it to end.

  I wondered if Susan had found shelter in a barn or sighted smoke curling from a chimney. I had told her to look for Quaker people, somber and neat in their dress, said that they were sympathetic to slaves. I did not tell her that on Nantucket their sympathy did not extend to worshiping with people of color. In the Precious-bag was a slip of paper on which I had written my address. And she could use the money I’d given her to buy shelter if she found a town and an inn that would admit her. But tonight, she likely would walk a long way till she found a safe house, for some folk across the river would return a runaway for the reward.

  I took a hot brick to bed with me so that I would feel less alone. There, though my toes burned, the grief for my mother and my baby washed over me like a cold tide. The tears ran from my eyes until I fell asleep. When I awoke, I awoke crying.

  I hadn’t known people could do that.

  I MADE MYSELF sassafras tea, and I warmed up a pot of grits that a neighbor had left. I put a pat of butter in the center of my bowl and poured maple syrup over that. It was good, but when I reached the bottom of the bowl, I cried again.

  MY DAYS were spent that way, with sudden bursts of tears. I gave in to them. The rocking chair became my place to cry. When the tears came, I hurried to the chair, covered myself with a quilt, rocked, and gave myself up to tears. These emotional storms had a natural duration, and when the time had passed, I arose, folded the quilt, left it in the chair seat, and set myself some useful task. When I grew weary, either in body or in spirit, of work, I permitted myself diversion. Shakespeare was the best, for his was a highly peopled world, and I had more than a plenty of vacant nature by opening the cabin door. Yet when Cecilia Packrode through the snow to visit and invited me to come home with her, I refused.

  I found diversion in the light, magical worlds of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. When I tried to read Lear, the love between parent and child broke my heart. Perhaps my mother, trapped under the buggy, raged against the storm: “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks.” No. I knew that her thinking would have more resembled prayer than imprecation, and that her prayer would have been that I be safely delivered. She would have gone to sleep gently, her head on a pillow of snow.

  And the women in Shakespeare who impersonated men! I had done that, too. Perhaps I had stepped so easily into the idea from having read him. The image of my aunt and my mother swashbuckling in the attic—Agatha and Bertha younger than I had been boarding the Sussex—wounded me, presented my mother’s space as vacancy.

  I commenced a long letter to Margaret Fuller raising the question of to what extent we modeled our lives from our reading. Remembering the story told by my Nantucket judge—I had almost forgotten Austin Lord—about the effect of Young Werther on the young people of Europe, I raised the question of an author’s moral obligation. Surely Shakespeare had felt it, for in each of the tragedies, though the stage be littered with bodies, there was left some idea of order or hope, or the memory of some transcendent act. For Lear, it had been the rekindling of his love for Cordelia, that love rising from the ashes of remorse. Somehow they had triumphed, even in prison, because of the exchange of love between them.

  And if one wrote for American men a modern epic, a quest, and it ended in death and destruction, should such a tale not have its redemptive features? Was it not possible instead for a human life to end in a sense of wholeness, of harmony with the universe? And how might a woman live such a life?

  When I switched from thinking of literature to life, I abandoned the idea of capturing any idea worth communicating to Margaret. I simply stared into the fire and decided to eat something sweet. Could the narration of pain, and of what had been of sustaining value in difficult times, be in itself redeeming?

  When I had languished in the whaleboat, I looked at the sky aglitter with stars and wondered if some other soul—a girl like myself—looked out into the darkness and wondered about me. Now I thought of Susan, probably still walking, but free now. Looking for her happiness. I rocked and stared into the fire.

  So I struggled through my days. At the end of one week, it being Christmas Eve, I thought that perhaps I would have some neighborly visitor, but it snowed again. I noticed the thick blanket of snow so enwrapped the cabin that it was warmer inside, and I need not burn so much wood to keep it so. I began to feel like an animal in its burrow. Furiously, I read Shakespeare to feel that people yet lived and breathed in the world. Though I had cried out to him, my Ahab seemed but a myth.

  I pictured him not with a lance but sitting in his captain’s cabin with a shepherd’s crook. The God of the Old Testament, reduced to human terms, might resemble my Ahab. Unreal Ahab had brought me a rich house and left me in it, and a babe within me. Why then was I here in the snowy woods of Kentucky, and where was my babe? A year ago at Christmas, Kit had pissed on my skirt. Not far away a piano had played carols.

  I turned from Shakespeare—the plots ensnared me—to my father’s Bible, to the poetry of the Psalms. Only those songs soothed my loneliness. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures…. He restoreth my Soul.” Those words, that song, that, only that, promised redemption, the restoring of my soul.

  And what of that promised Messiah of the Old Books, promised to be born the very next day?

  What is the Lord? my still, small, skeptical voice questioned in the snapping of the fire. I wondered if I was sick, so fevered, so convoluted was my thinking. The Lord seemed to be Hope—not Faith. Susan’s Jesus was her hope. But she had said the best name of the Lord was Love.

  No. I am the Lord, said the fire, this small spark, this undulant tongue, as much as the psalmist who could sing “The Lord is my shepherd.”

  We are the Lord, the quiet logs emanated in their brownness from the enclosing walls.

  I am the Lord, spoke the radish, lying long-tailed on the thick china plate.

  How could the material world, the world we consumed, claim divinity or even kinship with humankind? I felt amused and smug in my whimsy. Beauty is the permeable membrane: I was startled, unprepared. Who spoke?

  No one, no thing, spoke again.

  “Jesus, our Brother, strong and good,” the old Christmas carol titled “The Friendly Beasts” hummed semi-wordless to me from the bed of memory, “was humbly born in a stable rude. / The Friendly Beasts around him stood, / Jesus, our Brother, strong and good.” And the bramble bush that I imagined had caught on Susan’s coat as she pushed northward; with its sharp thorn it, too, claimed to partake. And the forehead of the black whale swimming toward us malevolently. Am I not a beast, a brother? I turned away—And what were you to those you devoured?—away from that question, quickly, quickly. And completely.

  Yes, the simple song was right, not the fanatical preachers. Poetry told the truth, not polemic. Jesus was our Brother, and in our human kinship was our salvation. I rocked my chair toward that idea, for Christmas Eve in Kentucky. The song did not claim more. It did not ask to be believed—these fantasized animals “under some good spell” presenting their gifts of cows’ hay and sheep’s wool. The Christmas story asked to be imagined—never mind belief—and with imagining came the capacity for compassion.

  Ah, the dove: the last gift—Aunt Agatha’s verse to sing when we created our makeshift Christmas holidays, a green swag pinned to the stony tower. But why did she have my mother’s voice? “I, sang the dove, fr
om the rafters high, I cooed him to sleep that he should not cry…. I cooed him to sleep on Christmas morn.” When my father died, Aunt Agatha had taken me like a giant baby into her lap. My mother, my child—lost—how much more I needed my aunt. I sang to myself, in a low, speaking register, there being no one there to sing to me.

  Yes, the poet of the Christmas song whispered to me in the silence at the end—the singing, the telling—yes, you have guessed my meaning, or part of it—how life can be celebrated and can be given rest. How else is life made real, but by story and song and fiery dance?

  CHAPTER 94: The Guide

  MY REVERIE by the snapping fire ended with a knock at the door. When I tried to push it open, I found the load of snow so heavy against it that I could not.

  “Pull,” I called to my visitor, who heard me, for the boards registered a jerking.

  “Together,” I said, “on three.” I counted and I pushed and the person pulled, and the door flew open.

  There was no one there, just the bare place, a fan shape, carved in nearly four feet of drifted snow.

  “Are you behind the door?” I asked, and I peeked around. Again no one stood there. But there was a movement under the snow. The force of the opening had knocked the visitor down and buried him completely. Where I saw the most movement and determined a head to be, I began to part the snow with my hands.

  What I found in the snow was fur—animal fur—and the black leather snout of a wolf emerged, followed by blank vacancies where eyes should have been! And then I saw a swale of human hair. The snow was churning with his movements to free himself. I stepped back. From within the snow, into the clear space before the door burst the bounty hunter, the dwarf who had covered his head and shoulders with a wolf skin. His face was plastered with snow, and snow caked his beard and the fur of his cloak; but it could be no other. Snowman, wolf-at-my-door, wolf-man, his eyes were there, amber, almost golden. Kind.